1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for providing position information to computing equipment installed in racks of a datacenter.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One of the areas in which progress has been made is in aggregating these powerful computing systems together in a datacenter. Datacenters may contain many servers, hundreds or even thousands of servers, installed in various racks through the datacenter. From time to time, servers may be installed in or removed from a data center for many reasons including, for example, for maintenance or replacement. Often the maintenance or replacement of a server is time sensitive because that server may perform important business functions. Due to the large number of servers and racks in a typical datacenter, however, tracking down the physical location of a particular rack or a particular server in such a datacenter is often difficult and time-consuming.